Avila Not Worthy of Life, Jury Told

Life in prison isn’t punishment enough for a man who stole from a little girl the chance to live life, to have a first crush, graduate from high school and bear a child, a prosecutor said Wednesday in urging jurors to choose the death penalty for Samantha Runnion’s killer.

“By his selfish act, he denied Samantha Runnion all of those things,” Orange County Assistant Dist. Atty. David Brent said of convicted murderer Alejandro Avila. “Justice demands the ultimate penalty in this case.”

But lawyers for the 30-year-old Lake Elsinore man who kidnapped, sexually assaulted and suffocated the Stanton girl asked jurors in the Santa Ana courtroom to consider Avila’s troubled childhood, which included beatings and being raped when he was 5 years old.

“I beg of you, if you have mercy for that boy,” said Assistant Public Defender Denise Gragg, “then I ask you to show that mercy now.”

The eight-man, four-woman jury will start deliberating today.

Avila snatched 5-year-old Samantha on July 15, 2002, as she played outside her family’s condominium. Her nude, battered body was found near Lake Elsinore.

Wednesday’s emotional closing arguments capped five days of testimony in the penalty phase, much of it focused on Avila’s upbringing. Although Brent acknowledged the “serious problems” and violence in the Avila family, he said sympathy for that should not be a factor in the jury’s decision.

“There are some crimes that are so horrible they can’t be mitigated,” Brent said. He then asked the jury, “What sympathy or mercy did he show Samantha Runnion?”

Brent said Avila deserved to die primarily because of his purported motive for killing the girl: so he wouldn’t have to face trial on molestation charges, as he had the year before in a case in which he was acquitted.

“This is just an outrageous way for the defendant to have conducted his business to gratify his urges,” Brent said. “It’s what the death penalty is made for.”

Gragg said her client’s upbringing didn’t excuse what she dubbed a “hideous” crime. “She was a beautiful and a precious little girl,” Gragg told jurors.

But she added that had Avila not endured what he did as a boy, he would not have become a pedophile or killed Samantha. His childhood warped his free will and the choices he could make in life, she said.

“Without that childhood, without those choices that adults made, we wouldn’t be standing here today,” she said. “You can’t say this stuff doesn’t matter.”

She said she didn’t want jurors to forgive him, just allow him to live the rest of his life “in a small cell in a very hostile prison environment.”

“I’m not asking for a lot of mercy,” she said. “Just enough mercy for the unrelenting, unbroken years of abuse. Just enough to let God decide who dies.”